Silverlight Page-Turning Demo

Microsoft recently launched their Flash competitor, Silverlight, a cross-platform, cross-browser media player. I took a look at the demos and I have to say I was generally unimpressed. The page-turning demo in particular was disappointing. I remember seeing Erik Natzke demo the effect in his presentation at Flash-in-the-Can 2004. He used it in a project for HP and there's another even spiffier version. This thing is fun to play with. You can drag the page around wherever you want and it's a cool simulation of a real page. Silverlight's demo, on the other hand, stripped away the freedom of motion and restricted the page's movement to one dimension.

It's no fun.

On the bright side, I'm pretty happy with the name change from WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere) to the much more agreeable "Silverlight". The name inspires some pretty nice wallpapers, too.

I'll definitely check out the public beta when it comes out in less than a month, but Microsoft's got a lot of ground to cover if it wants to compete with Flash. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.